76. Distressed: Ballet, Opera, Film and Two Biographies, reviewed by Sandy
Our employer, Louise Ebersdorf, called me in for a private chat recently, and I must report on its outcome. She presented me with two books on Buster Keaton, gifts from Liane Beach. Louise had just taken a Skype conversation with Mme Beach during the Parisian entrepreneur’s brief visit to the U.S., a lengthy colloquy one of whose subjects was my future “hire-ability”. It seems our French colleague was concerned that I no longer check enough boxes as a choreographer for commissions from today’s international ballet companies. It is true that as a “gay” man I am not unattractive in certain potential employers’ eyes, but it is also true that many choice dance-making commissions now go to women, especially since #MeToo has made boards and governors think twice about the potential toxicity of males in positions of authority. Mme Beach suggested that I might seriously consider making a transition to the female gender, and of course our boss listened to Liane with enlightened ears since Louise encouraged and funded her assistant years ago toward gender change, which turned out happily for both the former Pip (now Pippa) and our patroness. Louise stressed that she and everyone else on “the team” admires me just as I am and looks forward to my work for The Ballet, but here is a career move that I should contemplate with the world market in its current state. Keeping my cool, I replied that I would take the idea under consideration. After all, Mme Beach may have in mind my eventually making a ballet for her Parisian company, Le Swing, which is all-female in its personnel. French logic, I suppose, demands a sacrifice. Lucidity is all.
My first (unspoken) response was: “Never!” But then I began to see the advantages for my C.V. Formerly proudly and openly “gay”. Check. Subsequently proudly female. Check. Non-toxic. Check. Guiltless of sex criminalities. Check. Potentially bisexual. Check. Possible future candidate for artistic direction of major ballet company. Check. You see where my mind was trending.
And then I thought of other potential consequences. The guys I might be attracted to post-procedure might not respond to my new identity. And some just might (including ones I don’t respond to). Then, again, what do I gain by intransigence? Maybe the world is sending me a message to go with the flow and make a change. One doesn’t want to be left behind. I suppose you could say that I was somewhat professionally “distressed”, like those gorgeous limited edition “Paris” trainers from Balenciaga which I would love to own. (Can’t I charge them off on my income tax once I use them to rehearse my dancers?)
Not wanting to burden my friends with self-questionings, I did what I always do. I lost myself in spectatorship. Spring means the return of New York City Ballet and its dancers in repertory. (We learn who they are as artists from their Balanchine roles; they unfortunately remain mysteries in premieres, which are usually focused on ensemble. None of the house or guest choreographers seems capable of making lead roles.) Cheryl and I went to several performances, including Unity Phelan’s debut in Agon. The speed with which Phelan handles the transitions in the pas de deux allows her extra time to demonstrate that each silhouette, no matter how extreme, flowers from the Balanchine-Stravinsky rhythms. The blossom arrives incontrovertibly, like a fact of nature. The feats of balance are always a product of Phelan’s dance movement, without trickery or blur. Phelan is fleet, seemingly casual, with a cushion of the “arbitrary” in her timing -- since a dance gesture or movement can suggest personal choice as long as it is embedded in an impersonal governing rhythm. (As Balanchine might say: the individual step is possibly negotiable; the rhythmic phrasing is not.). Jovani Forlan was equally striking in Agon’s first pas de trois. He stays just a bit ahead of the music in his solo – admirably so – thus the transitions have a catch-up snap and a hint of swagger.
Phelan created a different effect as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There she is the most ethereal of fairy queens, almost impalpable yet tautly commanding in the pas d’action. We are used to tall Titanias who can be a bit recessive in their interpretations, although broad in their effects. (An Amazonian ballerina can easily become seduced by a big movement scale.) Mid-sized Phelan resists such temptation. She uses her speed to find precise relations between movement qualities and, as a result, to discover how much musical detail is reflected in the choreography. Each Phelan développé is a unique stroke.
Phelan’s Oberon was Anthony Huxley, who is able to bring varieties of strong accent to his Scherzo. Harrison Ball combined an elegance of style with delicious comedy as Puck in the same cast. On another evening, Emilie Gerrity made a promising debut as Titania, crystalline in her phrasing. She was lucky to have the new principal Chun Wai Chan as her cavalier in the pas d’action, and her Oberon, Roman Mejia, brought solid attack and real ballon to his debut in the role. These performances are especially reassuring during a time when the company is dealing with Covid and going through a transition in management.
Cheryl, Master Raro and I sped as a threesome to the Met Opera for its revival of the excellent Patrice Chéreau production of the Strauss-von Hofmannsthal Elektra. (I first saw it when it was new at the Met in 2016.) The lead role was once again Nina Stemme, and the Chrysosthemis was the new Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen. Stemme was as impressive as I remembered, giving the profile of this taxing role even more variety and cumulative impact than in her performance six years ago. Of course, everyone concentrated on Davidsen, who is being compared already to Flagstad and Nilsson. I was taken by the silver-tinsel aura around her sustained tones – so Straussian. I would love to hear her in more of this composer, and eventually Wagner. Her dramatic scenes with Stemme had a sisterly warmth and complicity I’ve never heard before in the score. Cheryl and Master were rapt before Davidsen.
The most fascinating music in the opera is the entrance of Clytemnestra, who sings of her nightmares and sleeplessness. (She has somehow suppressed her memory of the killing of her husband Agamemnon by her lover.) Strauss and von Hofmannstahl were clearly inspired in this section of the work. And I always relish the moment when Elektra realizes she has failed to supply Orest with the ritual axe which she has obsessively reserved over years for his murdering hand: something always goes wrong at the last minute in the best-laid plans! The opera suggests that Orest is himself Elektra’s (and fate’s) weapon of revenge: he is the sharpened blade. Strauss’ anticipation music as Elektra anxiously awaits the proofs of slaughter is thrilling. I remember being disappointed in 2016 at Stemme’s sketchy dance of death at the end of this production. (I had been hoping for some real choreography.) But this time it seemed right for the orchestra to exult and for Elektra to be drained and discarded. Her life’s work is over. Elektra brought the idea of a female dancing herself to death on the opera stage in 1909. (Strauss’ Salome had featured the Dance of Seven Veils in 1905.) Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps was premiered by the Ballets Russes in 1913, with its chosen maiden’s fatal solo. Stravinsky may have wished to top Strauss’ atavisms.
Cheryl and I took in a new movie, Montana Story, which turned out to be an Elektra narrative with the genders flipped. I’ve been reading the reviews of the film, and I can’t get over how few of the reports even begin to deal with its themes and artistry. (What has happened to American film criticism?) Story is a character study of a brother and sister attending the last coma-maintained days on his ranch of their stroke-victim father, who managed to alienate both siblings through physical violence and by shielding a local strip-mine from government surveillance. Erin (played by Haley Lu Richardson) is the Orest character, returning from the East for one last encounter with her parent. Cal (Owen Teague) is the modern Elektra, a gay son now saddled with settling ranch finances and reconnecting with his embittered sibling. The acting by Richardson and Teague plumbs psychological depths. You realize how the subject of sister-brother relations is never explored sufficiently in drama, novels and films – at least beyond hints of fashionable incest, which are absent here. Elektra’s missing axe becomes young Cal’s wrestling with a recalcitrant electrical generator during a rainstorm. Erin administers a possibly unintended coup de grace to her parent.
Montana Story’s color cinematography by Giles Nuttgens makes eloquent use of landscape and mountain vistas. Nuttgens’ exploitation of natural Western light takes digital technology to new heights of expressivity. The editing by Isaac Hagy sustains interest across the legato pacing of the film and includes one daring jump-cut that indicates with a shift of perspective that Cal will henceforth commit to re-bonding with his grimly retributive sister despite her fury. The film is co-written and co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whom you may remember for their remake of Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment as The Deep End (2001) and for their witty modern version of Henry James’ novel What Masie Knew (2012), with a brilliant performance by Julianne Moore as a rock star and errant mother. Montana Story adds further distinction to the McGehee-Siegel partnership.
I am now deep into Liane’s two gift books on Keaton, but I’ve also read a new biography of Harold Rosenberg (Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life by Debra Bricker Balken, University of Chicago Press, 2021), he who applied the Marxist concept of the “act” or “action” in his writings on art and artists. I am intrigued how such an approach to aesthetics can deal with dance. I suppose that the refined choices of dance artists – both performers and choreographers -- would qualify as specific “actions”, but I am always impressed at the combination of various pressures that produce our art, influences from within and without beyond willed initiative. Great dancing bathes one in information and distills that immersive experience as well. The idea of a decisive “act” doesn’t really cover all that is involved, at least in my experience of how the artistic will redefines itself in practice. Rosenberg’s mature writings show an openness to the unique qualities of individual painters, sculptors, and photographers. He was particularly articulate about the over-influence of New Criticism, especially the formalist emphasis found in Clement Greenberg’s writings. Too many producing artists had come to use theory and critical formulas as rigid templates applied to their own new work, which for Rosenberg had to arrive at statements beyond the academic. There is certainly something to be said for his doubts along these lines. We see an equivalent reliance on inherited tradition (and the opposite, a sad lack of knowledge of such inheritance) on our ballet stages every season.
It is possible to come away from Balken’s biography with only a general sense of Rosenberg’s character as a private citizen. He was a man of strong ego and many ideas. He could be intransigent when it came to aesthetic principles. I had no idea that he was a poet as well as an art critic. But the book is fascinating in its portrait of Rosenberg’s colleagues, his intellectual milieu. I was happy to encounter young versions of Kenneth Burke, Parker Tyler, and Dwight Macdonald, figures who had dialogues with Rosenberg on political and artistic issues. Stumbling upon a young Tyler is like suddenly recognizing him playing a psychopomp in a film by Maya Deren. Tyler from the new angle is himself and yet also “in process”, as a motion picture can hold a fluid moment. Perhaps Rosenberg’s rule of the “act” cannot cover such artistic process, and this is why a Marxist-inspired aesthetic can now seem too simplistic and abstract to me.
I was also interested in Rosenberg’s search for a nomenclature for the local activity of New York painters during the 1940s and 1950s, a loosely organized approach which he termed “action painting” in his well-known essay “The American Action Painters”. Balken points out that it was Robert Motherwell who proposed “New York School” as a designation, and it was Robert Coates who came up with “Abstract Expressionism” as an alternative. Certain poets in our city borrowed the description “New York School” for their own purposes. I don’t believe there was ever an “American Action Poetry” inspired by Rosenberg’s own verses.
Cheryl loaned me her copy of a new biography of Nijinska (La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern by Lynn Garafola, Oxford University Press, 2022). Toward the beginning of the volume, the author quotes from a 1932 interview with Nijinska: “For me, dance is a rhythm. You know what rhythm is in music. Well, dance rhythm and music rhythm are not the same. Dance, music: two sisters with a ‘single’ existence. Two separate rhythms. The same thing in one harmony.”
Nijinska was strongly influenced in this matter by her famous brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, and his three choreographies: Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring. Here is evidence that Lincoln Kirstein was correct in seeing Nijinsky as the first modern choreographer, with his sister and George Balanchine extending an aesthetic of music-dance rhythm into twentieth century ballet. All one has to do is encounter Nijinska’s Les Noces (and to some extent her Les Biches) to see the transformation of an art form under this shared approach to dance theater.
Garafola does not enquire into aesthetic precepts beyond the examples provided by Nijinska’s works and the contemporary comments on their effect provided by journalists, dancers, and critics. Some of these reports can be devastating. André Levinson saw Les Noces as barrenly martial when not over-mechanized. Given the subtitle of her volume, the reader might expect Garafola to say something about the meaning of “modern” at the ballet, but her approach is cumulative rather than analytical. We learn more about the struggling woman than the innovative choreographer.
The obstructions Nijinska encountered in her career (her gender, her Slavic background, her high standards of artistic collaboration) were equaled only by her own tendency to alienate her employers and collaborators. She allowed Lincoln Kirstein to slip through her fingers and signed a contract with Sol Hurok.
Garafola’s lengthy chronicle is a product of immense research and a type of prophylactic relation to the artistry of its subject which is typical of the American academic mind in our time. (Universities do not seem to be able to deal with dance as dance.) Nijinska the choreographer slips through Garafola’s fingers as the biographer documents the abundant grotesque aspects of the life. The typical scene of Nijinska’s husband providing an ash tray for the products of her ever-present cigarette holder during rehearsals has its comic aspect, as does the constant intrigue between the choreographer and entrepreneurs and leading dancers. The chapter on Les Ballets de Madame Ida Rubinstein is enough to give today’s young choreographer multiple nightmares. (Cheryl says she had some after reading the biography.) I was fascinated with the new information on the interference of Cocteau on the making of Le Train Bleu. Can it even be said to be a Nijinska ballet after his many requirements for revision?
Reading all those multiple reports of backstage politics which were inflicted upon Nijinska has had an effect upon me. Ironically, I have been influenced by the passion of this talented, troubled woman in arriving at my decision to continue as a biological male (to the extent that the category is all that relevant in the eyes of today’s identity ideologues). Unable in her time to alter her gender, Nijinska’s refusal to be anything but herself -- the product of inherited genes and developed genius – has convinced me to maintain my status quo. As she struggled professionally as a woman, I struggle now as a male. Biology will direct my destiny. For better or worse, I am reconciled.
S.
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